DAVID NICHOLS pays tribute to the uncompromisingly unique Melbourne songwriter Pip Proud, who died on March 4 after a long battle with illness.

Pip Proud died two weeks ago from throat cancer. He was young (60) and had been incapacitated for eight years due to a stroke that left him blind and partly paralysed. He retained his sharp intelligence and critical abilities to the end. In his last weeks he enjoyed listening to ABC News Radio (through a haze of interference which seemed to affect every radio station in the institution he was living in) and the music of Tom Waits. He was entertaining the idea of recording an album of Waits covers, utilising what he referred to as his new voice (deeper and more guttural). As it transpired, the only recording he did with his new voice was two songs he recorded with Kes Band a few weeks before he died. One was about J S Bach, the other an invocation to a suicide bomber – obviously, though not overtly, his cancer – to come and get him.

When I met Pip it was 1995 and he was living just outside Tenterfield in northern NSW with his two sons Mickey and Louis. His other two sons, Ziggy and Jack, were living in town with their mother: the family had recently split and divorce proceedings would soon be under way. Pip was keen to get his music career going again. He did it, through the help of Alastair Galbraith who played Pip’s music to Craig at Emperor Jones, Alastair’s Houston-based record label. Craig became a devotee and Emperor Jones released four Pip Proud albums: one a compilation of unreleased 1960s material blended with more recent work, and three more, the last a collaboration with Tom Carter. There was also a single (‘Hey Gus’, with Alastair playing on it) and some other sporadic recordings. No one who saw either of his 2006 shows in Melbourne – the first shows he’d played in 37 years – will forget his intense abilities as a performer and also (though this was not obvious) as an improviser.

He was an unusual person by any gauge. He called you “man”, but he wasn’t a hippie, even if sometimes he referred to hippiedom as his proving ground. He was a stunning blend of the humble and the staunch: I get the sense that he was a very giving man all his life, and that a lot of that giving was quite often thrown back in his face. I am sure that for a lot of his life he was persecuted in various ways, not least for daring to be an uncompromising and unique musician, the sound and style of which was a manifestation of his personality and the way he saw the world. He was more of a punk, in the good sense, with complete contempt for authority and – particularly as he deteriorated and became more dependent on others – a desire to be respected and, as he put it, treated with civility as a human being.

I suppose that to my mind almost every song in his ’60s output was a gem; there was a lower ratio of gems in his 1990s-2000s material, though he could still come up with something that could take one’s breath away. He said to me a few weeks ago that he had been pondering whether most people just produce a small amount of good work, and then can never recapture it. I obfuscated (although it wasn’t a direct question) but of course I wonder this too. Pip was torn between trying to be user-friendly, something he was probably incapable of, and doing what felt right, something he did better than anyone.

“He was an unusual person by any gauge. He called you “man”, but he wasn’t a hippie, even if sometimes he referred to hippiedom as his proving ground.”

I know a potted version of his life story like the back of my hand: he was born in Adelaide in 1947 and his name was Philip John Proud. He learnt guitar in the mid-’60s when he was living in Cowra. He made his first record in his late teens in 1967; it was an LP called De Da De Dum, recorded on a tape recorder given to him by a mentor who also paid for the album to be pressed. Another supporter, Garry Shead (at that time a reputed cartoonist for Oz, and since known as a successful painter) made a short film about Pip with the same title. A major record company took him on and had him rerecord the original album under a new title, Adreneline and Richard. This, when you think about it (and notwithstanding the misspelling of “Adrenaline”, or perhaps because of it) is one of the most incredible names an album could have, but I digress. Pip traveled between Sydney, where he lived, and Melbourne, for a time publicising the album on television. This, in his memory, was the golden time of his pop career. How well the album sold is anybody’s guess, but it sold well enough for Philips, his label, to fund another one, A Bird in the Engine.

Twenty-five years later, when I met Pip, he had forgotten a lot of things from this time, or perhaps he didn’t want to remember them. He told me he paid for the recording of A Bird in the Engine himself because he wanted to do it properly. I don’t know if this meant he’d recorded it once before. Certainly there are pop magazine reports from the time that Pip recorded four singles in one day with a band. These were never released, if they were in fact recorded, unless they were released as A Bird in the Engine. This is probably one of those things we’ll never know. I mention it as an example of the way a lot of his background was somewhat unknowable: the best source was, if not unreliable, uncertain.

After A Bird in the Engine, Pip played two shows in Sydney and then went to England, where he didn’t get much further, just starved and wrote a novel. He and his girlfriend Alison trekked through the Middle East and India. His sister committed suicide and his parents paid for him to return for the funeral. He didn’t make music anymore, or at least, he recorded some songs but no one would release them. He wrote some prose, including some radio plays for 2JJ. He made jewellery and sold it at the market. He moved to Tasmania, and built a house. He moved to Tenterfield. In between (or rather, behind) these various moves were divorces and new relationships with the three key women in his life.

He told me that between the ’70s and the ’90s he had been ridiculed for his early music (though some people were extremely touched by his work). He had been trying to live it down, more than anything and had not played a guitar for years (though he still had his Maton and indeed this was laid out on the table at his funeral with his akubra and flowers from Alison, who had appeared on De Da De Dum with him). The Emperor Jones connection was quite clearly a major vindication for Pip, whatever else it was. I felt that the show he played at the East supporting Ariel Pink in 2006 was an even greater vindication but Pip never spoke about this again. He was blind by that stage and perhaps not entirely aware of what a massive success that show was, and how many hundreds of people were rendered incredulous. Perhaps more to the point by the time he played the show he was extremely drunk, as he was at every opportunity by that time in his life, and it might have been a bit of a blurred memory. Drinking was a huge part of Pip’s life all the time I knew him and it quite plainly messed with him in various ways. It was perhaps odd that the smoking, rather than the drinking, killed him though he did say he had only been drinking for a couple of decades, whereas he had been smoking twice as long.

I feel privileged to have known Pip and, through him, a range of other extraordinary people including his remarkable sons. I have got so much out of Pip’s art that I have often been shocked when people have felt comfortable dismissing, diminishing or disparaging his work. It would be untrue to say Pip didn’t care – it hurt him very much when people dismissed him, but he was a stoic person to say the least. Perhaps the scars from the way he felt he had been treated forty years ago made it difficult for him to take pleasure from the fact that he had thousands more fans in the 21st century – there was a niche for him by that late stage – than he had in the late 1960s. Maybe he felt it was just that he was now being appreciated or perhaps he didn’t want to seem proud.

Pip’s children (all now adults) turned his funeral, held last Friday, into a celebration of the life. The alcoholism was not ignored. A slide show was displayed, mainly showing Pip the father, building houses in northern Tasmania and northern NSW. All his kids and both their mothers were there along with well-wishers whose lives he had touched in interesting weird ways. One, who played for many years with an internationally famous experimental group, recalled Pip from Saturday television in the ’60s, was paying his respects to a man who had been his first real introduction to what would now be known as alternative music. Another had licensed his work for reissue in the ’90s. Another had suffered a long period of Pip Proud debauchery during his final bid for stardom. Others had witnessed his 2006 Melbourne shows and knew and loved his work. Another had recorded his final songs. Another had covered a Pip Proud song on a single.

It was as fitting a tribute as could be made given the man was such a menace to himself. But there was a lot of love in the room and a lot of respect, too, for someone who did things his own way and with his own sense of the absurd and the beautiful.

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